Lester Goldman
A major presence in the Kansas City art world for nearly forty years, Lester Goldman taught painting at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1966 until his death from cancer in 2005. Goldman began his career as a figurative painter, drawing inspiration from such European masters as Balthus and Jean Hélion via Leland Bell, Goldman’s teacher at Indiana University. In the 1970s Goldman moved into abstraction and in the mid-1980s embarked on an ambitious ten-year, three-phase project, The Latest Blow to Mirth, consisting of chaotic, carnival-like environments incorporating large-scale paintings and mixed-media sculptures, texts and diagrams, music, video, and collaborative performances, all enlivened by prolific Dadaesque wordplay. Much of this work engaged contemporary social and political issues and events, such as the first Gulf War of 1991.
In the late 1990s Goldman’s focus returned to object making as he created lively and inventive abstractions in a variety of media. Goldman’s 1998 exhibition at the Jan Weiner Gallery emphasized a concern with drawing and painting in complex and colorful compositions writhing with linear and biomorphic elements. His 2001 exhibition at Joseph Nease Gallery of largescale paintings, sculptures, and mixedmedia works featured antic biomorphic shapes, high-keyed colors, and patterns and dots and black-and-white stripes, the latter related by Goldman to the stripes of concentration camp prisoners’ uniforms. These stripes recurred in a memorable painting-sculpture hybrid made of stuffed vinyl fabric that Goldman presented at the 2001 Charlotte Street Awards exhibition. Goldman’s 2003 exhibition at Joseph Nease offered paintings, mixed-media sculptures, reliefs, and watercolors again featuring lively twisting and stretched organic forms, electric colors, and patterns of dots and stripes. A critic for Review characterized Goldman’s work as “exuberant and playful but rarely lacking a darker, or at least ambiguous subtext.”
The dark element came to the fore in Goldman’s final body of work, exhibited at the KCAI Crossroads Gallery in summer 2005. Titled Issachar’s Surveillance (Issachar is Goldman’s Jewish name), the exhibition featured sculptures made of fused, Cyber Green lacquer-painted gourds, grotesquely evocative of viscera and vertebrae, combined with white painted metal armatures, canisters, and tubing that conjured medical equipment. Goldman’s 2000 visit to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, where the Nazis performed unconscionable medical experiments on Jews and others, inspired these sculptures, which express skepticism toward modern biotechnological research while fundamentally protesting man’s inhumanity to man. Combining formal clarity and ethical urgency, Goldman’s final sculptures stand as perhaps his most cogent and eloquent works.
—David Cateforis
